


RIP 2 My Youth

by Anonymous



Series: Within/Without [16]
Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Established Relationship, Family Feels, M/M, Post Season 3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 06:22:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24759271
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Eddie grows up.
Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley & Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV), Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Series: Within/Without [16]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1738876
Comments: 52
Kudos: 342
Collections: Anonymous





	RIP 2 My Youth

Character was forged in any number of ways. War, certainly. Marriage and fatherhood—those were a little more complicated. Years of false advertising scrolled past his eyes like cartoons from other people’s lives. Go to war, do his job, provide for his family—he thought that was what it took to be a man. Shannon thought otherwise but he enlisted anyway. He learned to shoot a gun and he learned to place a tourniquet; he never really learned to change a diaper.

_“Eddie.”_

It wasn’t till after the silver star and purple heart were packed away in a shoebox and he’d found himself a single father that shit got real. Simply providing wasn’t enough, _he_ wasn’t enough, so he had to rise up and be better or he’d lose the only good thing he had left.

“ _Hey. Eddie.”_

Being Christopher’s dad meant being afraid all the time. He’d never been much for fear before—even when he thought his number was up in the Valley of Death, he hadn’t been afraid, he’d just been… sad, mostly. He’d felt nostalgia for a future that was no longer going to be his, a future that was bleeding away with every passing second and every flash of insurgent gunfire. But he wasn’t afraid, not really.

Now, though—

“ _Eddie, man, are you with me?”_

Fear.

All the time.

Scared shitless.

After Shannon died, the fear curdled inside his gut, no more illusions, he was all that stood between Christopher and the world. And even though he was better he wasn’t enough. There was so much to be afraid of. Daytime fears, adult fears: car crashes, tsunamis, earthquakes, ICE, teenagers with guns, cops, cancer, heart attacks, bombs, freak accidents—on the job, he saw them all.

“ _I’m right here.”_

At nighttime, though, fear belonged to kids, to Christopher. It was more difficult to understand its source, harder to give it a name. At night, Christopher’s fear was the shadow that a moving curtain projected onto the wall, the deeper dark in the corner of the room, the sounds of wood expanding and water pipes shifting. But it was much larger than that. It was behind all that. Too far out of Chris’s grasp to be faced, let alone dominated, a drowning lady with the face of his mother.

“ _Look at me._ ”

His son’s fear, his fear for his son, became a kind of entropy, forever destabilizing the very fragile equilibrium of his world.

“ _Eddie—”_

But then ballast had crashed into their lives, his and Christopher’s, ballast in the unexpected form of—

“Buck,” he said.

“There you are.” Buck smiled. Their faces were inches apart on the pillow and they curled toward each other like parentheses. He focused on the flutter of Buck’s eyelashes. Little things. The slope of his nose. Not too much at once. Not his eyes. Certainly not his lips.

“I—” his voice cracked.

“Eddie, it’s okay, man. I freaked out, too.”

That startled a laugh out of him. “The hell you did,” he said, giving Buck a gentle shove on the chest. Which was a mistake, because it reminded him that they were naked. He sat up and fumbled for the sheet, dragging it back down over them. They were at his house, so he couldn’t exactly run away. Well, he could hide in Christopher’s room, or find a reason to clean the garage—

Man the fuck up, Diaz _._

Not so long ago he’d nearly made his tomb forty feet underground, but he’d survived. Just like he’d survived Afghanistan. He could handle a conversation with his… with Buck.

“I totally freaked after the first time,” Buck insisted. “I waited till you’d left, but I did. So if you need to, like, freak out in private tonight, I can leave and come back in the morning to see Christopher, okay?” 

Oh hell no.

“I want this,” he assured Buck, brushing the heel of his hand against Buck’s where it lay between them, then clasped it decisively. Buck laced their fingers together and gave his hand a warm, reassuring squeeze. “All of it. Everything. S’just a lot, you know?”

“Yeah.”

An hour ago, maybe, Eddie had stood in the bathroom, looking at himself in the mirror. Examining his face. The longer he considered his reflection, the more he disappeared from himself. Instead, he saw the many faces that had formed his, a family tree of features: his abuelo’s jutting brow, his father’s nose, his mother’s cheekbones. He could recognize the genealogy of every expression, every tic: his abuela’s smile, his tía’s sardonic raised eyebrow. But this face, _his_ face—like all faces, it wasn’t just a collection of traces. It was also a first draft of a future face. The mutable substance of skin, always unfinished.

Then Eddie had gone back into his bedroom, where Buck had been lying, insouciantly naked, on his bed. (All that skin, all that muscle. Jesus, there was a _lot_ of Buck.) And he’d told Buck that he wanted to try it the other way. He might have said _I want to try it your way this time_ , which wasn’t really fair, because there wasn’t a Buck way versus an Eddie way. There was just the way they’d been doing it—the two previous times they did it—because Buck had been up for it and Buck had said _Yeah I want that_ and _You can do anything you want to me, Eddie._ And Eddie did, he had done, twice; the first time he laid Buck out on his back and the second time he had Buck ride him.

And god _damn._

But Christopher got back from summer camp this evening, which meant noise control would be effective immediately—and Eddie realized that he’d better carpe their last fucking diem if he wanted to figure out if he liked getting fucked anywhere near as much as Buck apparently did.

And god _damn._

He did.

“Eds?”

“Yeah?”

“I can hear your brain working.”

“It’s almost time to pick up Christopher.” 

“In an hour. Eddie—"

“Sorry.”

“No, don’t apolo—”

“Did you really freak out?” Eddie interrupted. “Or did you just say that to make me feel better?”

Buck pulled his lower lip between his teeth. With mere inches between their faces, Eddie could see every subtle shift in his expression.

“Both?” Buck offered after a moment. “I like trying new things, and obviously it felt fucking fantastic. If anything, maybe, I was freaked out by how intense it was? But we’d already said we were a family and talked about our feelings, so, like… yeah.”

“Yeah, what?”

“Yeah, the sex is gonna be intense if you’re in love with the other person.” Buck flashed him a dazzling grin. “And feeling that on, like, a viscous level is a lot to take in. Pun intended.”

“A _viscous_ level?” Eddie raised an eyebrow.

“Is that the wrong word?”

Eddie laughed.

“…on a—on a— _visceral,_ yeah that’s it—Feeling how much you love someone on a visceral level is a lot to take in. Pun still intended and also fuck you, Diaz.”

“You were a lot to take in too, Buckley.” They were both snorting with stupid laughter now. He cradled Buck’s face between his palms and kissed him on his stupid laughing mouth.

*

Christopher was quiet in the back of the car as they drove home.

He’d been ecstatic to see them at the bus drop, abandoning his crutches to throw himself at Eddie even as he extended a hand to Buck, and they’d ended up a messy tangle of arms, the two of them cradling Chris between them. Eddie felt an astonishing, almost revelatory, sense of completion. _Family._ He and Shannon had become a family the usual way: got pregnant, got married, met each other’s relatives, started filing joint taxes. This felt different. It didn’t matter that Christopher wasn’t Buck’s biological son, that Eddie and Buck weren’t married, weren’t yet anything with a label except _together._ They were family.

 _Remember this_ , Eddie instructed himself. When you freak out again later, remember what this feels like right now. 

It was sort of a perfect moment.

But then Chris had cried when he had to say goodbye to his new friends, and he was still sniffling intermittently in the back seat. Eddie exchanged a glance with Buck. Buck looked kind of stricken. He wanted to tell Buck that it wasn’t anything personal, Chris was just cranky—hungry and tired. The sun was setting, and Chris always got difficult in the car as the daylight waned. Their drive from El Paso had been absolute hell, Eddie stretching them to the limits of their endurance as he tried to make the trip in a single day, pulling into their new driveway just after midnight. 

Christopher, he wanted to tell Buck, felt the end of daytime acutely. The presentiment of longer shadows shifted his mood, eclipsed his softer daylight personality. Christopher, usually so mild in temperament, full of vitality and enthusiasm, became demanding, irritable, and a little bit melancholic.

But he couldn’t tell Buck any of that right now, and he realized, with a slow shiver of happiness, that maybe he wouldn’t have to. Because they were family. Buck would get to see and know every facet of Christopher—not just the best behavior he reserved for his best Bucky. And about damn time, too. Chris was an amazing kid, indisputably the greatest kid who’d ever lived, but sometimes Eddie wanted to punch something, listening to Buck go on about what an angel he was. Buck had yet to witness a real, full-blown tantrum. _Just you wait, motherfucker._

Besides, he knew how to shake off Christopher’s doldrums tonight. “Hey Chris,” he said, making eye contact with his son in the rearview mirror. “Buck’s gonna be spending a lot more time with us this summer.”

“Buck already spends a lot of time with us,” Chris pointed out, reasonably.

“Well, he’s gonna be spending even _more_ time, buddy, with lots of sleepovers, too.”

“Really?” That got Christopher’s attention. He was starting to smile now, in spite of himself.

“Yeah, superman. Lots of sleepovers,” Buck told him, and Eddie could hear the laugh caught in his throat. “Maybe we’ll let your dad hang out, too, but only if he plays nice.”

“Daddy, can Buck move into my room?” Chris asked.

“Well—”

“Or is he going to move into yours?”

Paused at a stop sign, he looked at Buck. Buck smirked at him: _Still your kid, Diaz._

“He’ll sleep in my room, yeah.” 

“Fine.” Christopher sighed. “But you have to share, Dad, promise?”

He promised.

*

As they tucked Christopher into bed later that night, Eddie was thinking about pronouns.

 _I, he, we, she_ : the pronouns had shifted since he and Shannon had started their family. Even before Christopher was born, the two of them had started speaking apprehensively about everything, even the trivial things, arguing in hushed voices like they were tiptoeing with their tongues, careful to the point of paranoia not to slip and fall on the suddenly very unstable grounds of their family space. And in those strange borrowed months before she died, the question of how the final placement of all their pronouns would ultimately rearrange their lives became the center of gravity—the dark, silent, core around which all Eddie’s thoughts and questions and doubts circulated.

Now _she_ was gone, a firm memory, but absent from their present-tense syntax.

 _I, he, we_ : Eddie watched Buck kiss Christopher’s forehead and ruffle his hair. “Night, superman. Love you.”

“I love you, too, Bucky,” Chris murmured, sleepy and content. 

_We, us:_ they drifted into the living room. Eddie wasn’t sure what the move was. He wanted to drag Buck back to his bed but worried that might seem a little caveman-ish. So they ended up on the sofa, a beer apiece, as Buck scrolled through the streaming services.

“Oh hey, _Do the Right Thing_ —y’know, before the 118, I didn’t know my ass from my elbow, culturally speaking,” Buck remarked. “Hen and Chim had to show me so many movies, and Bobby practically gave me a reading list. Turns out, there’s plenty of good shit predating 1991, notwithstanding the fact that I wasn’t born yet.”

“God, you’re young.” Eddie shook his head. He wasn’t even four years older, but something about the turning of the decade suggested a vaster gulf to him. Or perhaps Buck just wore his years more lightly; when Eddie was Buck’s age, he was still in Afghanistan.

“Alright, old man Edmundo, don’t choke on your dentures.” Buck pressed Play. “I love this movie.”

Rosie Perez’s silhouette flashed across the screen and Public Enemy erupted out of the speakers: “ _1989 the number another summer_ —”

Eddie hastily turned the volume down so they wouldn’t wake Chris.

“I can do this whole dance,” Buck volunteered.

“Yeah, I doubt that,” Eddie said.

He’d always had a bit of a thing for Rosie Perez.

“No really, me and Hen and Karen spent like three hours learning it one night. We have it _down_ , yo _._ ”

“Seeing is believing, Buck.”

“You’re on,” Buck said. He jumped to his feet and struck a sparring pose. “Start it again.”

Eddie restarted the movie and pulled out his phone, getting ready to record. “You know that you’re handing me prime blackmail material, right?”

“Nah man, me and Rosie got this! _Music hitting your heart / ‘cause I know you got soul / listen if you’re missing y’all—_ ”

“Careful, you’re gonna dislocate something—” Eddie was already cracking up at the sight of Buck flapping his arms, swiveling his pelvis around in time with Rosie in her little red dress.

“Nope! _We gotta fight the powers that be / fight the power / fight the power / fight the power_ —”

Eddie doubled over, laughing hard enough to cry. He couldn’t hold his phone steady, and Buck kept prancing out of the frame, arms and legs shooting off in every direction. But as jaw-dropping as the whole spectacle was, Eddie had to admit:

Buck kind of _did_ have it.

Like, nobody was gonna invite him on Soul Train, but the moves were _there_. The pelvic popping, the punches, the shadow boxing. Rosie all glowering and hostile up on the screen, Buck grinning like a lunatic below her. 

It was kind of… hot.

Rosie was hot, _Buck_ was hot—

Eddie was on his feet, spinning Buck around and slamming him against the wall.

“You see something you like, Eds?” Buck was panting, eyes alight with mischief, as he slid his hands into the back pockets of Eddie’s jeans, tugging him closer.

“Eres un idiota.” Eddie kissed him. “Mi idiota.”

“Tuyo,” Buck agreed against his lips.

Eddie jerked back. “That—that was grammatically correct,” he accused. “I thought you didn’t speak Spanish.”

“Contrary to popular belief,” Buck said, pointedly, “I’m not a complete idiot. I pick stuff up. I kicked around South America for a summer. Plus I watch the soaps, the telenovelas, with your abuela, Eddie, and she talks to me in Spanish. But I can’t roll my _r_ ’s so I don’t say much back.”

“Huh.” Eddie felt exposed. How many things had he said to Buck that were angrier, or tenderer, than he’d ever actually intended for him to hear? All this time, too, he’d thought his abuela’s chatter, her gossip and her sly little innuendos, were falling on oblivious ears. And what about Pepa, blunter, harsher: _Edmundo, te amas a ese hombre como un hombre ama a una mujer._ And Abuela, retorting: _Hija, tal vez Eddie lo ama como un hombre ama a un hombre._

“Are you mad?” Buck relinquished his grip and Eddie retreated another step, putting more distance between them. “I wasn’t trying to be secretive about it, I guess I just understand more than I thought I did.”

“I’m not mad.” Eddie looked past him, fixating on a spot of water damage in the corner. “I’m… thinking. About all the crap that my family’s said, or that _I_ ’ve said—”

“Abuela speaks really slow when she talks to me. I barely catch anything when you’re all talking to each other, it’s like way too fast—. Why? Would it be a problem? If I did understand?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” Again, he could feel the fear stirring in his gut, and with it, its cousin shame. He was in love with Buck, and he’d told him so. He was having sex with Buck, and he didn’t regret it. So why the sick churning in his stomach? Wasn’t the shame—wasn’t it supposed to be on the other side now?

“Can you explain it to me?” Buck asked.

“Let’s go to the bedroom.”

First they peered in on Christopher. He was breathing softly, evenly, his slumber utterly undisturbed by the ruckus of Buck’s Rosie Perez routine. His current stuffed animal of choice, a badger gifted by— _who else?_ —Buck, had fallen from his limp fingers; tenderly, Buck retrieved the toy from the floor and tucked it back into Chris’s arms.

In the bedroom, Buck sat on the edge of the bed, leg bouncing, as Eddie closed the door and proceeded to lean against it, arms folded. He knew it wasn’t a very inviting posture, but Buck was looking at him with open concern now. Eddie felt almost feverish. He dragged his hands through his hair, trying to flatten some of the disarray. “I think I’m—embarrassed,” he mumbled. “I always thought you were—I always wanted you to be—insulated—from that side of me and my family.”

“What are you talking about? I don’t wanna be insulated from _any_ side of you, Eds. You don’t need to protect me, we’ve already seen each other at our worst a thousand times—” Buck was protesting, ardently, adamantly, and god, Eddie loved him, but he didn’t fucking get it.

“My family is… Jesus Christ, Buck, if they knew I just had your dick up my ass—though, honestly, me having mine up yours isn’t much better. It’s just—different—for me. Okay?”

“Different, how?” Buck said, frowning. 

“I got three strikes against me.” Eddie began to pace, up and down the length of the small room. “Mexican. Catholic. Texas. What I’m doing here with you—what I _want_ to be doing here with you, don’t get me wrong—I feel like I’m up against my entire fucking DNA. My… lineage. Caballerismo—la cultura machista, I don’t even know what the English equivalent—. But it’s like, _ingrained_.” He took a deep breath. “You know what my abuelo—Edmundo, the one I’m named after—you know what he used to say? ‘Mejor un drogadicto que un pato.’ Well, apparently you speak Spanish now, so you know what that means: ‘Better a drug addict than a…’ yeah.”

“Right, the macho thing.” Buck nodded in recognition. “I get it.”

“No, Buck, you don’t,” Eddie told him sharply. “It’s cultural. I was raised to be a certain type of man, caballeroso, masculino, fuerte—strong, tough—virulente—”

“Eddie—”

“It’s whatever. It’s stupid. It’s fucked up. I know that. Doesn’t make it any easier.” Sick of pacing, he flopped down on the bed and stared moodily at the ceiling. “Shannon fuckin’ hated it. The machismo. And I was full of it, Staff Sergeant Diaz. _I_ had to be the provider, head of the family. Wouldn’t even let her to go back to work part-time after Chris was born… If we didn’t have a kid in the mix, I wouldn’t blame her for leaving.”

Buck was listening quietly. And Eddie was glad, relieved even, that Buck hadn’t leapt to his defense or tried to condone what a dumbass he’d been back then. It was pretty indefensible, and besides, he wanted—he _needed_ —Buck to hold him accountable if any of that old shit started seeping into the present.

“Being… not-straight… is still kind of unthinkable, for me,” he admitted. “Even with all the growing up I did after Afghanistan to become Chris’s dad and everything I’ve learned from the 118. Becoming a _real_ man and letting that toxic shit go ’cause my kid isn’t gonna end up like me, he’s gonna be better. I _know_ , but I’m still… freaking out. Afraid of it.” 

A heavy, charged silence fell between them. Eddie could feel his heart pounding, the sweat beading along his hairline, the unfamiliar aches in his body, the gentle soreness from getting fucked. He was breaking down into heap of disassembled parts.

Buck spoke then, voice reaching him as if across a great distance. Eddie only registered the last couple words: “…hold you?”

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘Can I hold you.’ I want to. Can I?”

It was on the tip of Eddie’s tongue to reply that he wasn’t a woman, he didn’t need to be held ’cause he got fucked. But that was the old Edmundo talking, Staff Sergeant Diaz, not the new Eddie, Firefighter Diaz, who was Christopher’s father and Buck’s _something_ , open-minded and all-embracing, except, apparently, when it came to himself.

(Incidentally:

Eddie gave Buck a lot of shit for those third-person characters he was always invoking: Buck 1.0, the sex addict (self-diagnosed); Buck 2.0, the one he’d grown into for Abby; and now, somewhat enigmatically, Buck 3.0 _,_ on whom he refused to elaborate—enough, apparently, that there _was_ a 3.0 extant and operational in their midst. Sure, fine, whatever, Buck.

Except now Eddie was doing it, too.

Staff Sergeant Diaz taping up his knuckles to go a round with Firefighter Diaz.

Shannon’s husband squaring off against Chris’s dad.

Edmundo versus Eddie.

The failure of his relationship with Shannon, maybe even all relationships, could be explained as a change from a regular old verb—to _fuck_ the other person—to a phrasal transitive verb—to fuck the other person _up._ Generosity in love, real and sustained generosity, was hard. If it meant that your partner needed to take a step away from you, maybe thousands of miles away, all the way to Afghanistan, or even just hundreds, from El Paso to Los Angeles… it was almost impossible. Consciously or unconsciously, he and Shannon had spent most of their marriage trying to fuck each other _up._ They had not been generous, not to each other or to themselves.

Evan Buckley, though, was generosity incarnate. Buck—1.0, 2.0, 3.0, whatever—was the most generous person any of the Eddie Diazes had ever met in their combined lifetime.

In his presence, Eddie felt generous, too—to Buck, to humanity, even to himself.)

“Yeah,” Eddie said roughly. “Go ahead.”

“Cool.” Buck plastered himself to Eddie’s side, enveloping him in a tangle of arms and impossibly long legs. “I like holding you. You’re so muscley, Eddie; it’s probably the closest I’ll ever come to knowing what it’s like to hold _me._ ”

“Fuck off,” Eddie said, but all he did was weave his fingers into Buck’s hair. Without product, Buck’s hair softened into waves, and Eddie was stupidly fond of those rebellious little curls that sprang to life whenever Buck was well and properly _tousled._

Tousled like he got after going a round with Eddie, in between the sheets.

“Mm, what do you want?” Buck rubbed his nose against Eddie’s cheek, biting lightly at his jaw. “More sex? Really, _really_ quiet sex?”

“You could never.”

“ _Could._ ” Buck caught Eddie’s earlobe between his teeth. “Try me. I won’t make a sound.”

“I’m…” He nudged Buck’s legs apart with his knee. This shit was _mortifying_ to say out loud—words, words, innocuous on their own but enough to make him blush when he strung them together in reference to himself. “I’m still… open. Jesus, Buck, I can still feel you there, d’you wanna…? again?”

He’d omitted a few key parts of speech—specifically _fuck_ and _me_ —but Buck seemed to get the gist anyway, and he shook his head.

“You’re already gonna be hella sore in the morning, Edmundo. Nope, sorry, you gotta put in allllll the work, if you know what I mean, and I’ll show you just how quiet I can be.”

Challenge accepted.

Eddie wrenched his shirt over his head and got to work on his belt—not his most seductive moves, but welcome to sex with a kid asleep down the hall. Everything had to be hushed, streamlined, disciplined.

Buck watched him strip, expression bemused. “Where’s the fire?”  
  
“Two doors down. We’ve gotta be—”

“Quiet, I know. Does your bed creak? I wasn’t paying attention earlier.” Buck bounced experimentally on the mattress. “Oh yeah, it sure does. Guess we’ll have to be really slow, too, or else—” He bounced again, and the bedframe groaned in protest.

“Stop trying to break my bed. Why are you still dressed?”

“It’s more fun when you take my clothes off.”

Eddie rolled his eyes but started unbuttoning Buck’s shirt for him. “You’re such a pain in my ass.”

“I really was, wasn’t I?” Buck gave him a roguish wink.

“Fuck you.”

“You’re about to.” Eddie tweaked his nipple, and he yelped. “You make it too easy, Eddie.”

Eddie shoved Buck’s shirt off his shoulders. “You’re the easy one.”

“Easy, how?” Buck’s voice sounded a little off, and Eddie cursed himself for an idiot.

“I mean, you’re easy to love,” he explained, fingers tracing over the tattoo on Buck’s chest. “You make it easy to love you. For _me_ to be in love with you.”

“Oh.” Buck leaned in and kissed him hungrily; Eddie parted his lips and let himself be devoured.

It wasn’t even weird anymore. Eddie loved the firm, proprietary way they handled each other. He rolled Buck onto his back and pinned him there, greedily running his hands over his body. There was so much skin to touch. He dipped his head and dragged his tongue along Buck’s sternum. “You wax your chest, Buck?”

“Naturally hairless, like a dolphin.” Buck groped his ass and dragged him closer. “You jealous?”

“Hey, at least I went through puberty.”

Buck smacked his ass in retaliation, and they wrestled a bit, the bed creaking ominously as they tussled, Eddie on top, then Buck, then Eddie again. They had a lot of muscle between them, and though the mechanics were more familiar now, Eddie still hadn’t gotten over the novelty of _strength._ The choice to exercise it, and the choice not to. They could flex their biceps and test each other’s stamina, and sometimes they did, because Buck was nothing if not competitive, and the first couple times Eddie, to his slight shame, had felt manlier about the whole thing when he brought his own strength into play. But he felt it less acutely now, the need to outflex and outmaneuver. It had become fun, silly, just one more variety of foreplay. And other times they chose to be gentle, tender, enveloping themselves in a cocoon of trust that was so achingly vulnerable that Eddie inevitably freaked out after, but it was worth it. Buck had pretty much summed it up earlier: _yeah, the sex is gonna be intense if you’re in love with the other person._

Buck, though, Buck needed to—

“ _Shut up_ ,” Eddie hissed, two fingers deep, trying to cover Buck’s mouth with his other hand. “You’re making too much noise.”

“It’s not me, it’s the bed,” Buck protested, tilting his head out of reach. “It squeaks every time I move.”

“So stop moving, idiota.”

“Quit teasing me then.”

“I’m not teasing, I’m being _thorough_ —”

“And I’m thoroughly fingered. C’mon, Eddie, get on with it, give it to me—”

“Three,” Eddie told him sternly.

Buck exhaled noisily. He was flushed and sweaty, hips shifting restlessly as Eddie applied more lube and began the painstaking process of adding a third finger. He couldn’t multitask as well as Buck; he didn’t have the ease or coordination to suck Buck off whilst he opened him up on his fingers—a feat Buck had performed, with obnoxious dexterity, on Eddie earlier that day. 

“How do you want me?” Buck asked, flopping back on the pillow.

“On your side.” Buck did as he was ordered, and Eddie spooned up behind him. He slid his leg between Buck’s, propping him open. The mattress squeaked, and even though it was probably his fault this time, Eddie felt obliged to threaten, “If Christopher wakes up, you get to be the one who—”

“Like you weren’t gonna dump that on me anyway.” Buck snorted derisively. “Don’t deny it, Eds, you were _always_ gonna make me explain sex to him, and we both know that’s for the best, ’cause imagine _you_ trying to—”

Eddie pushed inside him, and Buck stopped talking.

Best way to shut him up.

At least temporarily.

It was so good, and so much. Much too much not enough. Eddie bit Buck’s shoulder to keep himself quiet, and Buck, he saw, had a mouthful of pillow. Slow and quiet, jesus. They were both fucking masochists.

But here with Buck, Eddie felt as far as he’d ever felt from Afghanistan, from Korengal, the Valley of Death. From that endless night at the bottom of the well, buried forty feet underground. There were still things he was afraid of, daytime fears, like if and when he and Buck would tell the team, tell his family, and how soon was too soon to ask Buck to adopt Chris, and what if they got married. Adult fears. But Chris was asleep down the hall—god help them if he wasn’t—and Buck was in his arms.

_I, he, we._

Eddie surrendered and allowed himself to be happy.

**Author's Note:**

> ... a happy ending???
> 
> Not sure if the next installment will continue into the future or if I'll backtrack to fill in more gaps. Current events have definitely slowed my writing pace, so thank you for bearing with me! And I appreciate all your kind wishes more than I can possibly say. Once again, you are just the kindest, most supportive group of people <3


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